Speech given in Dawn Media’s Air We Breath Conference

I just want to convince you that farmers are not definitely not the villains in this day, maybe the antihero of the story. Generally in public policy, the focus, the right alignment of policy for the public at large and individual interest, they should be aligned. And in this case, the public policy interest is that there shouldn’t be burning, but farmers are burning the rice crop particularly.

Why is that individual interest coming out the way against the public interest? So let me give you a little bit background. This practice (crop burning) is not happening for every crop, and it’s not happening all year round for both the major harvests of the year. It’s only happening in the winter.

If you go back 20 years, 25 years, there are folks in the audience who will remember this wasn’t this problem before. And 20 years ago was this simple world of only wheat being harvested with large harvesters and the rice crop being cut by hand. Can you believe it? 2005, 2003 in Punjab, people were cutting the wheat crop by hand in the 21st century.

Now, with the global experience is that whenever you have a shortage of labor in rural areas is when mechanization really picks up. It doesn’t just pick up because government gives subsidies. It picks up mainly because there is shortage of labor.

And the shortage of labor in the rural areas, especially around harvest time, has been getting more and more extreme over the last couple of decades, particularly. And so, since there weren’t rice harvesters available, and this is the tragedy of the farmer in Pakistan, that the farmer is blamed for taking action, which is forced by the lack of facilities, lack of modern seed, the yields are so low, costs are going up, etc. This is not stuff that the farmer can control.

So, the farmer did not have access to specialized rice harvesters. So, which harvesters were ready, were available? The wheat harvesters. And the wheat harvesters, the simple thing to understand is that the wheat harvesters cut at about 15 inches because the wheat, the stalk is 15 inches above the soil.

And what you really need in rice is 4 inches so that the next crop can be done. Now, this difference, 15 inches, and 4 inches, this is central to the problem. Because the wheat harvesters started to be used.

I remember 7 or 8 years ago in Punjab, people were observing that the rice harvest used to be about 6 weeks or so, from around the 1st of November to about the 10th of December. And it shrank within a few seasons to 20 days. Because the harvesters were being used, whether they are new, whether they are right for rice or not, the harvesters were being used.

And it saves the farmer a lot of time as well. So, they took it. But, as different from wheat where the straw is useful for cattle, and it sells as well, so if you apply some money to labor to cut it out, it will sell.

So, you will recover your cost. Unlike that, rice, straw is not used for cattle, not suitable for cattle. And so, that, if it’s cut at 15 inches, it has to be burned.

What would you do? It’s what I ask. What would you do if you’re in that situation? The costs have been going up for the farmer, the yields have not been going up. We have to do a lot of work on seeds still.

So, the solution is to burn. And there is a better solution available. Rice harvesters are there, but they are expensive.

The new ones are expensive. The Asian Development Bank did a very comprehensive survey in Punjab a couple of years ago for mechanization. And they asked the average age of the wheat harvesters in Punjab that people are using.

And the average age was 37 years, 37 years! So, they are already done 20 years in another country, and then they’ve been running for 17 years in our country. So, you can’t expect the results, and it’s not the right harvester anyway.

These rice harvesters are expensive. We’ve done a lot of discussions with government saying, let major corporate players of Pakistan come in and provide this service. And they don’t have issues of access to capital.

So, the farmer will get a few more months every acre if the rice harvesters are used for rice. And so, farmers will pay. But I think this is where, you know, in policy school, Raveena, they teach you about good practice, good policy, and good politics.

So, it’s good practice to have the rice harvester. It’s good policy to try to finance some large scale, you know, large players for this. But it’s not good politics.

Because in the end, the decision that comes out, and I’m being a little bit flippant here, but this is really, I think, how to understand it. When the policy decision comes down to the politics, it’s the optics of giving a handful, a hundred harvesters to big companies who can really do the job and get it done and get loans, et cetera, for them and make it a sustainable business versus the optics of giving 10,000 small machines, which may not be the right ones, to small farmers. Always the small farmer option wins.

And maybe that’s good, but it’s still not solving the problem. So, that’s, I’ll stop here.